It's been college-brochure autumnal this weekend, and in deference to the weather I've baked a ginger cake dense and spicily sharp then smooth with a gently sour dairy tang on top. I wish I had some of that fleshy sugared ginger to stud the margins.

For a small dinner party on Thursday: roasted eggplant and peppers, chickpea tagine, tabbouleh, moroccan salad with oranges and olives, cranberry date cake. Perhaps orange sorbet if I'm awake and clearheaded enough to handle a knife and zester before I leave for my TA class.

I don't know why I read the Times' wedding announcements each Sunday. Even after the most satisfying Saturdays they leave me feeling emotionally underdressed, or gauche somehow as if I were at one of those posh receptions swilling Champagne from a novelty mug.

My copy of the Meditations looks like a Talmud, its text overtaken by emendations: the inkily unconfident undergraduate print, the furry pencil marks of a few months ago like my own Rashi script, my teaching notes written maternally and expansively in purplish pink. What seemed to me so scholarly now looks like desecration: the translators' phrases ( Read more... )

It's lovely how late summer straddles fall and spring, the leafy vernal dampness hovering just above the shards of oak and maple leaves broken off from their skeletons and the twigs stiffened into the shape of scolding fingers.

All that's felt urgent to me has been exhaustion--not even satisfying it nearly drowned by sheets in the afternoon --but the sheer, sore eruption of it. I've become an insomniac of the most tedious sort, tottering through the day bruised-eyed and achingly dulled. Every daydream is nocturnal, lunar-eclipse-like nearly, portentous and out of

Because I haven't had the chance to engage in my favorite of the deadly sins (gluttony and lust, if you need reminding) lately, I'll indulge in some pride. I managed to solve yesterday's NY Times crossword. I.e., the devilishly difficult-seeming one with 28 black squares in a grid of 225. So take that Will Shortz and Manny Nosowsky! Unless, Manny, ( Read more... )

Oh and it really irks me that I misspelled 'trite' in a previous entry. That's what I get for nattering on about transcendental idealism and art.

this is pretty awesome but at the same time it feels frighteningly banal. I think I'll stay high up in the ivory tower...

FIRST PART

ON THE PASSIONS IN GENERAL AND, INCIDENTALLY, THE WHOLE NATURE OF MAN

I. That which is a passion with respect to a subject is always an action in some other regardThere is nothing in which the sciences we have from the ancients appear more defective than what they wrote about the passions. Because this is a matter whose content has ( Read more... )